What Moves the Dead

Eh. I just reread Fall of the House of Usher earlier this month for Spooktober so I was really excited to dig into this one. A retelling of one of the most iconic horror stories of my childhood and by an author whose work I have been very much enjoying in the past couple years? Everything about this screamed a yes. Unfortunately, this fell a little bit flat for me, so this would be a 2.5/5. I felt like the whole plot reveal at the end was super obvious from as early as the 10-20% mark of the book, so I spent most of the book just waiting to see if I'm right or not, much to the detriment of the tension in the book. I will however say that the climax of the book was at least still well done and engaging enough.

Our story opens with our protagonist, Alex Easton, who is answering a letter from childhood friends, Madeline and Roderick Usher, stating that Madeline was in critical condition from a sudden mysterious illness. Along the way, Alex also meets a mysterious English mycologist, Eugenia Potter, as well as an American ex-medic soldier boarding with the Ushers, Denton.

The plot here only vaguely follows that of the Fall of the House of Usher and deviates from it more and more as the story goes on. A lot of things have been inserted into the story here, which I don't normally mind in retellings. I don't even mind if authors wanted to insert a new message, characters, or settings into their retellings of an iconic piece of work. What I did take issue with here is how random and meaningless the insertions seemed to be. A major new element here is the protagonist being from a fictional European country called Gallachia, in which apparently people who serve in the military are “gifted” with new gender-neutral pronouns, kan and ka, in order to distinguish themselves as a soldier. Alex being a sworn soldier uses those pronouns and it's used liberally in dialogue and narrative in the middle of English sentences: e.g. Alex checked kanself. Ka was bleeding. It just felt really really clunky and contrived. My bigger issue with this is that it never served any purpose in the story, not even to convey any sort of message, so I was really confused why this was even added in at all except maybe to chalk up diversity points.

Another more minor point is having Eugenia Potter as the aunt to Beatrix Potter, who is mentioned in a nudge nudge wink wink moment only once in the story. In the first place, I thought the presence of a mycologist, and a female one at that, self-admittedly rare as all hell in the time period, on the scene just seemed way too convenient as well. Then, we had another pointless reference that led nowhere, mentioned in my spoiler above.

As I mentioned, I pretty much guessed the whole mystery of this one from very early on in the book, not that the book was really trying to be subtle about it with the very first lines of the book opening with talk about fungi, and the actual book cover having so many mushrooms on it... it's not that hard to guess. This made the whole middle portion of the book feel a little draggy because - I feel like I already know what's going on, why can't the protagonist see what's super obvious in front of their eyes, can we get on with it already? It took away from the tension of the book, which is integral to creating horror.

I will give credit to the ending of the book which was still pretty engaging and still packed a few punches even though there wasn't a twist that surprised me. I had guessed it about the zombie fungus, but had imagined Madeline to be a complete puppet. Instead in the end it seemed like she retained some kind of consciousness of herself, even if it had been completely poisoned by that of the fungus. Or who knows, maybe it was the fungus itself pretending to be Madeline and talking to Alex? Also the part about Roderick having killed Madeline and thus her romping about with a broken neck was also a little bit of unexpected horror. Again though, didn't need Eugenia to come traipsing with her magnifying glass to tell me that those filaments are fungus... Would've also liked it if we had ended it with all of them getting infected rather than a deus ex machina element where we find out that they've actually not been drinking from the lake all along, and somehow sulphur was enough to kill all the fungus there. Just tied it up a bit too neatly imo.

Merged review:

Eh. I just reread Fall of the House of Usher earlier this month for Spooktober so I was really excited to dig into this one. A retelling of one of the most iconic horror stories of my childhood and by an author whose work I have been very much enjoying in the past couple years? Everything about this screamed a yes. Unfortunately, this fell a little bit flat for me, so this would be a 2.5/5. I felt like the whole plot reveal at the end was super obvious from as early as the 10-20% mark of the book, so I spent most of the book just waiting to see if I'm right or not, much to the detriment of the tension in the book. I will however say that the climax of the book was at least still well done and engaging enough.

Our story opens with our protagonist, Alex Easton, who is answering a letter from childhood friends, Madeline and Roderick Usher, stating that Madeline was in critical condition from a sudden mysterious illness. Along the way, Alex also meets a mysterious English mycologist, Eugenia Potter, as well as an American ex-medic soldier boarding with the Ushers, Denton.

The plot here only vaguely follows that of the Fall of the House of Usher and deviates from it more and more as the story goes on. A lot of things have been inserted into the story here, which I don't normally mind in retellings. I don't even mind if authors wanted to insert a new message, characters, or settings into their retellings of an iconic piece of work. What I did take issue with here is how random and meaningless the insertions seemed to be. A major new element here is the protagonist being from a fictional European country called Gallachia, in which apparently people who serve in the military are “gifted” with new gender-neutral pronouns, kan and ka, in order to distinguish themselves as a soldier. Alex being a sworn soldier uses those pronouns and it's used liberally in dialogue and narrative in the middle of English sentences: e.g. Alex checked kanself. Ka was bleeding. It just felt really really clunky and contrived. My bigger issue with this is that it never served any purpose in the story, not even to convey any sort of message, so I was really confused why this was even added in at all except maybe to chalk up diversity points.

Another more minor point is having Eugenia Potter as the aunt to Beatrix Potter, who is mentioned in a nudge nudge wink wink moment only once in the story. In the first place, I thought the presence of a mycologist, and a female one at that, self-admittedly rare as all hell in the time period, on the scene just seemed way too convenient as well. Then, we had another pointless reference that led nowhere, mentioned in my spoiler above.

As I mentioned, I pretty much guessed the whole mystery of this one from very early on in the book, not that the book was really trying to be subtle about it with the very first lines of the book opening with talk about fungi, and the actual book cover having so many mushrooms on it... it's not that hard to guess. This made the whole middle portion of the book feel a little draggy because - I feel like I already know what's going on, why can't the protagonist see what's super obvious in front of their eyes, can we get on with it already? It took away from the tension of the book, which is integral to creating horror.

I will give credit to the ending of the book which was still pretty engaging and still packed a few punches even though there wasn't a twist that surprised me. I had guessed it about the zombie fungus, but had imagined Madeline to be a complete puppet. Instead in the end it seemed like she retained some kind of consciousness of herself, even if it had been completely poisoned by that of the fungus. Or who knows, maybe it was the fungus itself pretending to be Madeline and talking to Alex? Also the part about Roderick having killed Madeline and thus her romping about with a broken neck was also a little bit of unexpected horror. Again though, didn't need Eugenia to come traipsing with her magnifying glass to tell me that those filaments are fungus... Would've also liked it if we had ended it with all of them getting infected rather than a deus ex machina element where we find out that they've actually not been drinking from the lake all along, and somehow sulphur was enough to kill all the fungus there. Just tied it up a bit too neatly imo.